For that free Grace bringing us past great risks
& thro’ great griefs surviving to this feast
sober & still, with the children unborn and born,
among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt
and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude.

We praise our ancestors who delivered us here
within warm walls all safe, aware of music,
likely toward ample & attractive meat
with whatever accompaniment
Kate in her kind ingenuity has seen fit to devise,

and we hope—across the most strange year to come—
continually to do them and You not sufficient honour
but such as we become able to devise
out of decent or joyful conscience & thanksgiving.
Yippee!
Bless then, as Thou wilt, this wilderness board.

— To Patty
Maybe it's sheltering today under
a blizzard of paid bills and bank receipts,
or maybe it flew south. Do you wonder,
dear, why old age (a murder of crows) greets
us with cawing? We've faced its raw music
lightheartedly, scattering our last crumbs
among mourning doves, which, just in the nick
of time, pecked them before it snowed. Numb is
indeed what our paired hearts must hope to be
to keep pounding through another season
of teeth-chattering cold. Calamity
has not yet touched us, love, which is reason
enough for good cheer and celebration.
The snow flowers like a white carnation.

In the old joke, the marriage counselor tells the couple who never talks anymore to go to a jazz club because at a jazz club everyone talks during the bass solo

But of course, no one starts talking just because of a bass solo or any other solo for that matter.

The quieter bass solo just reveals the people in the club who have been talking all along, the same ones you can hear on some well-known recordings.

Bill Evans, for example, who is opening a new door into the piano while some guy chats up his date at one of the little tables in the back.

I have listened to that album so many times I an anticipate the moment of his drunken laugh as if it were a strange note in the tune.

And so, anonymous man, you have become part of my listening, your romance a romance lost in the past

and a reminder somehow that each member of that trio has died since then and maybe so have you and, sadly, maybe she.

This poem called to mind one of my favorite recordings (below) which has embedded in it some remarks/reaction and laughter from a lady in the audience which I feel is priceless and which I anticipate and enjoy hearing every time. It really puts you there. No, she wasn’t chatting up her date, but fully immersed in the experience she was having. I especially love her laugh around the 4:18 mark, and again at the end.